Texas lawmakers gave cities the power to regulate homes for the mentally ill -- but so far, Dallas hasn't used it.

The first few months after her husband died, Heather Boulware was fine. She didn't feel fine, of course, but she managed to keep taking the medications she'd been prescribed five years before to treat her bipolar disorder and continued to care for the couple's three children. "I was doing what I'd always done," she says. "But I was completely numb."

Suddenly, about six months later, "everything just fell apart."

Her husband's death had been equally sudden: Pneumonia had landed him in the hospital, but he'd made a strong recovery and come back home. Then he caught a cold. She came home one afternoon from a quick trip to the grocery store to find him dead.

Nomi Vaughan

Demetra Donaldson runs three homes, two in Pleasant Grove and one in North Dallas. "I'd be excited to be getting some type of standards."

Nomi Vaughan

Heather Boulware, one of Demetra Donaldson's residents.

After a few months without him, she sent the children to her mother's house in Oklahoma. She intended for them to stay there only a few months while she pulled herself together, but after awhile, she stopped taking her medication and started making a new plan. She cleaned out the apartment, set cut-off dates for all the utilities and wrote a series of letters to friends and family, which she left to be found later.

Finally, a day came when she knew the maintenance man would have to stop by the apartment. She didn't want her body to go undiscovered for weeks or months, so it was time. "I wrapped a cell-phone charger cord around my neck," she says. "Then I put a 13-gallon garbage bag over my head. Then I put another cell-phone cord around my neck."

But she didn't die. Boulware awoke in Green Oaks, a psychiatric hospital. From there, she was transferred to Terrell State, another hospital some 40 miles east of Dallas. "I was so mad I was still alive," she says. "I was like, 'How dare you save me?'" It wasn't until hospital staff forced her to take her medication that she realized how grateful she was to have been saved. "I don't even really know how to explain it, except your thinking is totally backwards."

Her stay at Terrell lasted 16 days, a bit shorter than the month or so the average patient remains there. She wasn't completely well, not by a long shot, but the immediate storm had passed. Where would she go from here? The only person she felt she could stay with was her father, a salesman, but he was often away for work. After talking with a psychiatrist at Terrell, she realized that with so much time alone, she likely would try again to kill herself.

On a recent afternoon, Boulware was sitting cross-legged on her small twin bed in a house in Pleasant Grove. One of her roommates, a petite schizophrenic woman who at times thinks she's a very large man, hovered in the doorway, bouncing a little and smiling anxiously.

Boulware was lucky to live through her suicide attempt, and lucky too that she was able to find a decent boarding home to move into. She says that the Pleasant Grove house has helped her start to get better. But the fact is that some boarding homes may make their clients worse, by being dirty, chaotic, overcrowded or downright dangerous. For many residents, finding a good home is just a matter of chance. The city of Dallas, cash-strapped though it is, has the power to regulate these homes and eliminate some of the gamble people like Boulware face. Right now, though, the city isn't using that power, and it's unclear if or when it will.

Boulware is a pale woman in her 40s with brown hair and glasses. She's told her story so many times to so many doctors, therapists and caseworkers that all the emotion has drained out of it; she could be talking about the weather. But when she talks about resuming her life away from the boarding home, her smile falters. She looks a little queasy.

"I don't really know," she says. "I'm trying to take it one day at a time. I get bad anxiety. To think much beyond next week for me, even, everything gets bigger and bigger and I get totally freaked out."

Boulware looks around the tiny room, the neatly made beds, her few books in a tidy stack on the floor. She goes quiet for a moment, glancing over at a picture of one of her sons beaming from the dresser. "I'm grateful I'm alive," she says finally. "I'm grateful I have somewhere to go where I feel safe."

If you're mentally ill in this country, chances are better than average that at some point you'll find yourself in an emergency room, a jail cell or a homeless shelter. If you're poor, too, you might not know where you'll go next, after your immediate crisis is over. For many, that next stop is a boarding home.

Places like the house where Boulware ended up, which is run by a woman named Demetra Donaldson, are generally considered the best-case scenario: clean, orderly and calm. In other boarding homes, residents have complained to police and social workers about overcrowding, dirt, bad food, theft and drug use by other residents.

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This article and the Observer's earlier articles illustrate the dark side of the body business, where people take control of other people's lives, patient recruiters are given access to captive populations, and the rules are made by groups like Mental Health America who get money from the drug industry. It is an environment ripe for fraud, kickbacks, and other forms of corruption. Getting people off the street when they have no where to go is a laudible goal. But only if it is done without violating people's safety and their basic rights.

@357 Armadillo Demetra Donaldson is a crook who states she runs a non-profit organization and only claims she has three boarding homes when in fact she has 6 or 7 and are run by unprofessinal and disorganized management. She also peddles stolen devises such as stolen MacBooks and other electronic devices. She is very unstable and will lie to tenants family members to try and extort more money from them. Her whole operation is a tragic example of why Dallas needs to regulate people and their so called non-profit organizations because she and her whole establishment is a complete fraud. If you want a stable and caring facility to live in PLEASE for your own safety stay far away from this organization.